JD/PhD Candidate – Northwestern University

Author Archive:

This post has been updated from the previous one located here. I left the previous post up so that anyone interested in changes over time can see the previous results. There are about 50 more profs in the network now. Interestingly, in just the past few days the structure of the law prof twitter network has

Following recent discussions about the importance of blogging/tweeting to contemporary academia (see: LSE via TaxProf), and Bridget Crawford’s Law Prof Twitter Census (version 3.0) over at TheFacultyLounge, I thought I’d do some number crunching and network building. I wrote a short script to read all of the law prof twitter handles included in the census and

The role that collaboration plays in creativity and the production of knowledge is an major focus of my recent research. As such, I’m generally interested in patterns of collaboration. Having mostly wrapped up the fall submission season and participated in selecting the last articles that I will help select for the Northwestern University Law Review, I found myself wondering about patterns

I recently did a quick language analysis of appellate case briefs to determine whether there were linguistic traits of the briefs that could be used to predict the case outcome. I collected about 100 briefs, from cases where Westlaw had both appellee and appellant briefs. Briefs were then coded by procedural posture,

This post was inspired by the discussion about the value of research in legal academia at Workplace Prof Blog. In the comment section of the linked post you’ll see that on the one side of the issue we have individuals like Mitchell Rubenstein arguing that “teaching is only of secondary importance” to today’s legal professoriate.

This is a preview of some work I’ve been doing recently. Using some multiplex relational information, I’ve assembled a network of the US federal government. After a bit of voodoo and some community detection algorithms, we see three communities within the federal cabinet. In the image below, node size is proportional to weighted degree, so

I try to use Linux for much of my real work. I find it useful to have a clean install with nothing but a good Python environment and a well-equipped version of R. However, I’ve had trouble getting the full suite of Statnet packages to install. Despite various attempts to install the packages, I’ve always

At the request of @caitlinkealey I’ve given the #congress11 hashtag the same treatment as #CCA2011 and made a quick-and-dirty network graph of those using the tag. Its a big difficult to read mess, but it looks like there are two components that hold together quite well. While the divisions aren’t 100% clear, the graph seems

As a newcomer to conference tweeting, I was interested in getting a better look at what was going on than I could get from the twitter search features. So I graphed the network of all those using the #CCA2011 hashtag. Nodes are obviously twitter users – with size relative to total degree (in+out) – and

It looks like CBC.ca has closed commenting on stories posted today. I’m not sure if there are changes in policy coming, if the moderators are on holiday, or if the commenting system is just down for maintenance. May there is a re-design in the works. They could certainly use it. If they’re insist on having